In 1986, when Jim Hodges had just graduated from art school, he regularly destroyed his own finished works. The materials he used then — mainly dirt and dust — were throwaways anyway. But these ritual mutilations, he said, reflected “a punk attitude of destruction, a kind of anarchist approach to things.” They were also the … Read More

Yamamoto Masao writes the following in Shizuka (Cleanse) Living in the forest, I feel the presence of many “treasures” breathing quietly in nature. I call this presence “Shizuka.” “Shizuka” means cleansed, pure, clear, and untainted. I walk around the forest and harvest my “Shizuka” treasures from soil. I try to catch the faint light radiated … Read More

Photography is dead. That news may come as a surprise, since obituaries about art tend to be written about painting. Invented in the 1830s, photo-graphy is still in its infancy as an art form compared to the centuries-old medium of painting. Despite inventions like portable paint tubes and fast-drying acrylic, painting has not undergone the … Read More

There is a crisis with regard to Representation. They are looking for Meaning as if it was a thing. As if it was a girl, required to take her panties off as if she would want to do so, as soon as the true interpreter comes along. As if there was something to take off. … Read More

“I want [the paintings] to have an old, modernist feel, but also looking at abstraction, not from a Greenbergian perspective… but from a nostalgic perspective… it’s adding a more personal perspective… the way we see an image is a little different than a generation before us… because of what media we grew up with.” – … Read More

I like real art. It’s difficult to define REAL but it is the best word for describing what I like to get out of art and what the best art has. It has the ability to convince you that it’s present – that it’s there. You could say it’s authentic… but real is actually a … Read More

Sometimes when you dream, you know that you are almost awake and dawn is on its way and yet you get stuck in a nightmare that keeps on repeating itself. Images of different times spinning around your head in a frenzy, forcing you to go round in endless labyrinths of the past, sometimes dressed-up as … Read More

Mostly, though, paint functions as a medium of resistance for Ligon; it occludes visibility and threatens form. Nowhere is such deletion more explicit than in Untitled (Cancelation Prints) (1992 and 2003), where a flesh-coloured ‘X’ overtakes the entire white image field, demarcating the distance between the construct of whiteness and the pinkness of most European … Read More

Paintings may be pictures, but they are always objects. The blatant materiality of Sergej Jensen’s canvases made them seem part of the interior architecture of Neu’s gallery. Jensen has consistently had an ambivalent relation to the spaces in which he shows his work. Previously at Neu, he arranged mats on the floor that resembled his … Read More

Lucy Skaer created these drawings consisting of rhythmic black sharpie spirals in grids, pictorial shapes, and patterns additionally filled in with graphite like a tapestry. She wove together different earlier drawings as a patchwork and utilized a few assistants to carry out the tedious, repetitive labor. Here, we see a play with drawing on paper … Read More

In 1959, Bob Law lay in a Cornish field and wondered how to describe the space he was in. His solution was a series of drawings in which figurative elements – such as trees or houses – are arranged along a doddery pencil line at the perimeter of the paper. A year later, Law had … Read More

Alex Hubbard’s latest New York solo show, “Somebody had to do it,” combined the cerebrally slapstick and the delightfully inscrutable… Hubbard reaches or steps into the image, moving slowly and with great seriousness as he balances everyday objects, one atop another, to form a rickety tower, until the lot collapses with a bang. – Brian … Read More

In his recent work Manor Grunewald has made a dual turn, pushing his paintings in two seemingly opposing, but in fact intimately related directions. Towards a washed out, nearly empty field, on the one hand, and towards a full, image-laden one on the other. – Alex Bacon See more artworks by Manor Grunewald here.